| Subject: Dawnwalker starts |
Author: Wes Boyd [Edit]
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Date Posted: 16:34:17 05/25/08 Sun
What with getting "Dawnwalker" started posting tonight, I've been thinking for a few days that it's time to get to work on a new project. Actually, I've got a major project that's maybe three quarters done, but I just haven't felt like working on it. I've had a couple ideas for other things, but really haven't been able to get a handle on them.
Being Memorial Day weekend (in parts of the US, anyway) you would figure that I would have a little extra time to develop these kinds of things, but it's not happening this weekend. Friday night, Kathy and I went to a School Bus figure 8 race. She and I like to watch racing, and watching school buses in a figure 8 race is a hoot, to say the least. You may not realize it but school buses are pretty tough -- they're not made of aluminum foil. We watched a similar race last fall in which two buses were turned on their sides. They came out with this great big front loader, rolled the buses back on their wheels, and they finished second and third. There was a bit more destruction on Friday night but it was still fun.
Then yesterday, Kathy had a number of errands for us to do in a nearby town, followed by a retirement party for some woman she'd worked with. "If we're going to that I think we ought to go to the races while we're up there." So, guess what, there we were, doing local short track races the second night in a row.
Now, today we have the Indianapolis 500 and the Whatever the heck it is 600 in Charlotte. I doubt that I'm going to get much done today. And I won't get much done tomorrow morning -- the local American Legion would send out a hit squad if I missed the local Memorial Day activities. Then I've got a guy coming to work on the satellite dish tomorrow afternoon. So, whatever happens, getting anything useful done this weekend is pretty unlikely.
One good thing out of this is that on the way back from the race last night I happened to mentally re-examine one angle on a story I'd been kicking around a while back, and thought of a way to make it work on its own, rather than as a part of the story I had been considering. At least now I have a bright idea to kick around.
Dawnwalker, the story that starts tonight, started something like that. It started as a short story of about 8,000 words, which is an awkward size, but at least got me writing after a dry spell. That turned out to be a false start but helped me to define who the story was going to be about. Within days, I'd blocked out a few chapters of a new start, and got going.
When I started Dawnwalker, I didn't have any idea where I was going. Well, I shouldn't say that; I knew where it was ending up but I didn't have much idea of how I was going to get there. About all I knew was that I wanted to write a big, complicated doorstopper of a novel. Well, I did; it was 383,000 words at the end of the first draft, although I've done quite a bit of trimming and honing on it since; it's currently about 340,000.
The heck of it was that when I finished, there were several places where there were loose ends that cried to be cleaned up. Before the winter was over with, I had one of those loose ends crying for attention, so I finally went ahead and wrote the story. That wasn't even the most glaring loose end; it took me some thinking before I worked out how I wanted to take care of that. And so on . . . there are currently five books in what I've taken to calling the "Dawnwalker Cycle", and a sixth one needs to be written. I've made a couple false starts at that, but there is so much backstory needed that I've having trouble with it. The Dawnwalker Cycle is now over a million words and it isn't done yet.
I don't plan on posting the Dawnwalker Cycle consecutively, for a number of reasons. While I consider it a separate story line, the Dawnwalker Cycle is still more or less a Spearfish Lake story. Major parts of three of the six books (including the tentative story line for the sixth book) are set in Spearfish Lake to a greater or lesser degree; Spearfish Lake people play important parts in two of the others. I will admit that in one of the six Spearfish Lake isn't even mentioned, but I don't think you'll notice it much. But the Dawnwalker Cycle books tend to intermingle with story lines of the "regular" Spearfish Lake stories, so I want to let those stories develop in order without laying out many spoilers. For example, Jennifer Evachevski plays an important part in one of the books, but we haven't met her since Busted Axle Road and there are things that have to happen with her in another book first. I've got it figured out how to do it, but we have to do it in proper order.
I have to admit that setting a portion of the book at Northern Michigan University reflects the fact that my daughter went there for a while, so it was a handy place to reach out to for color. However, persons or events related there are fictional (like everything else in this book), and bear no relationship to the truth. The same thing holds true for the Grand Canyon, which plays a part in all of the Dawnwalker Cycle books. The geography of the Grand Canyon is real (except for one key place which I made up), but all persons, companies, events, and the like are fictional, except where clearly stated as accepted history.
"Dawnwalker" proved to be the most expensive book I've ever written, mostly because while I was writing it, I got hooked on the Grand Canyon. I spent a lot of time researching the canyon, but online research proved to be not enough, so not long after I finished the first draft I signed up for a $2500 trip down the canyon. I never imagined I would ever take a vacation that expensive and not take my wife along. Let me tell you, that's the most awesome scenery on the face of the earth. My Grand Canyon trip experience showed up quite a bit in the revisions of Dawnwalker, and in the follow-up books. It was worth the money; I'd like to do it again some time.
Anyway, since I'm losing the evening to NASCAR, I'm going to put the first post up a little early tonight. I hope you all enjoy Dawnwalker. I've enjoyed it a lot so far.
-- Wes
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